Environment: Related Content

Need caption to provide context for Plan inquiry. —Rivvy Eisenberg 'XX

There will be an exhibition of student work on view, "Connecting Through Place: The Future of a New England Mill Town," at the Left Bank Gallery in North Bennington. Bennington faculty and students used the town and landscape of Bennington as a vehicle to understand connections between the biophysical world, societal issues, and history. The College was awarded a National Science Foundation grant in 2012 in support of a three-year curricular project aimed at exploring sustainable futures for former mill towns in New England.

Summer Brennan '01 won NYU's second annual Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award. Brennan's first book was The Oyster War: The True Story of a Small Farm, Big Politics, and the Future of Wilderness in America. She has written for New York Magazine, Scientific American, Pacific Standard, McSweeneys, The Millions, The Rumpus, and others.

David Bond, associate director of the Center for the Advancement of Public Action, spoke with Vermont Public Radio about a course being taught at Bennington College about PFOA. 

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Bennington College nearly $90,000 for a Rapid Response grant to support a new course and conduct original research on the perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) contamination recently discovered in Hoosick Falls, NY, and North Bennington, VT.

Faculty member Kerry Woods spent last semester completing a month-long Fulbright Senior Specialist program project in Slovenia. He collaborated with Slovenian scientists from the University of Ljubljana to develop a network of forest researchers in eastern/central Europe to use of long-term data-sets from European old-growth forests. The project culminated in an international workshop that he organized with Dr. Thomas Nagel at Ljubljana.

The Bennington College Program on the Environment is launching a speaker series examining the effects of environmental change, from climate change to urban and suburban development, on infectious diseases for both humans and animals.

Boston Globe columnist Joan Wickersham cites Bennington's biomass heating system as an example of biomass done thoughtfully.

Ecology faculty member Kerry Woods contributed to a study finding that forests with dense canopies create a microclimate that protects a variety of vulnerable plant species from warming air temperatures. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, was picked up by several media outlets, including BBC News.

The National Science Foundation has awarded Bennington a $200,000 grant in support of a three-year curricular project aimed at exploring sustainable futures for former mill towns in New England.

Ecology faculty member Kerry Woods’ research on "Losses in understory diversity over three decades in an old-growth cool-temperate forest" has been published in the March issue of the Canadian Journal of Forest Research.

Environmental Studies Director Valerie Imbruce was interviewed on WBAI Pacifica Radio in New York City this week for a segment on the City's plans to make its food system more locally sourced and accessible to low-income and immigrant communities.

Columbia University Newberry Professor of Geology Wallace S. Broecker, a major figure in the climate-change debate and one of the most influential geoscientists of the last half-century, will discuss "What Must We Do to Combat Global Warming?" onThursday, September 30, at 7:30pm in the College's Tishman Lecture Hall. The event, this year's Robert H. Woodworth Lecture in the Sciences, is free and open to the public.

Bennington's campus bike share program, public transportation stop, and student-run organic garden are a few of the new sustainability initiatives that were highlighted last week by the Bennington Banner. Read the article here. 

The Princeton Review has recognized Bennington as one of the country's most environmentally responsible colleges, citing the College's new biomass heating system and expanded environmental studies curriculum in its first ever Guide to 286 Green Colleges.

With a substantial, multi-year grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Bennington will establish a new interdisciplinary environmental studies program. Beginning this September, the program will unfold in the context of the College's major new curricular initiative, which aims to address public needs of urgency, complexity, and importance.

Amory Lovins, author of Winning the Oil Endgame and CEO of the Rocky Mountain Institute, will speak at the first annual Four College Issues Forum—a forum founded by Bennington College, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, Southern Vermont College, and Williams College "to bring significant discussion of national and global issues to the region and to their campuses."

Part II of Making space—for home, for preservation, for performance, for community.